Gmail Mail Fetcher – if only it worked…

A while ago I decided switch to Google’s Gmail as my primary email account. Since most of my emails arrive on another account/server, I was hoping to use the Mail Fetcher functionality of Gmail to collect these emails from that old account automatically into my Gmail account. Well, it’s not that simple…

I went to Gmail -> Setttings -> Accounts and Import -> Check email from other accounts (using POP3). Here I filled in all the fields, and hit ‘Add Account’… which gave me the following error: Server returned error: “Connection refused”.
First I thought: ‘Incorrect password’, and tried again. Same error. Then I went to the pop3 service logs on the email server of my old account, to see what was actually happening.
Turns out Google doesn’t even try to connect to my server. No connection attempts whatsoever in my Dovecot logs, and I know for sure my firewall isn’t blocking any connections on port 110.

How to resolve this? I’m not sure… I tried with adding another POP3 account on a different server. Same problem. If only there was a way to get in touch with a human at Gmail… 😎

For the time being I’ve set up forward on the old server, but some day I hope to be able to use Mail Fetcher instead…